Makin' Moves

2011 is about to begin and you better believe I've got big plans.   What big moves are you planning for 2011?

The WOD Log

Having a workout log is essential to your personal success and continued improvement.  WOD logs can be anything from a small booklet, spiral notebook, or kept electronically in an Excel Spreadsheet.  Even some of us folks who have been training for years and are all too familiar with our PRs and benchmark times still need a reminder from time to time.  Not only that, but having a written record of your personal achievements creates a more concrete, tangible way to represent your success (other than that beautiful bod you've been working day in and day out to create!).  If you are yet to start a workout log, now is the time!  Its benefits greatly outweigh the 2 minutes a day it takes to keep it updated.  I personally use an Excel spreadsheet, which I may need to make a backup copy of in the event of a computer crash... :)   Along with logging your progress, this will also allow you to make notes on how certain weights felt, whether or not you did the workout Rx'd and if you should up the weight/intensity next time!  Compare this information with your food log (bc I know you all have one of these too... ahem) and you may find some correlations between what you eat and your performance on any given day.  This will help you and your coach in dialing in your success.  Before you know it, you will be reeling in the gains hand over fist only looking back to see how far you've come!

The Dip (My Dip!)

I have been putting off doing something as simple as starting a blog and entering my first post, and it got me started on thinking about how I ended up here in the first place.  When I was younger and presented with the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" it never really came down to being a coach/personal trainer.  I have played soccer since I was little, so most of my friends, as well as myself, were already pretty fit.  I hadn't quite realized that this is not the case for the majority.  I have always been interested in human biology, which led me to persue a career as a doctor, but never in the fitness field.  While in college at the University of Texas here in Austin, I worked at Seton Medical Center as a nurse's assistant.  It was here that I started having thoughts of "man, it would be great if these people never got themselves in the position to be so helpless and sick".   I thought of things the patients could be doing at home to prevent these events from repeating themselves, as well as possibly increasing their level of fitness to somewhere it hadn't been in years.  Also during my time at UT, I had stopped playing soccer and had become dissatisfied with my own fitness.  This led me to begin researching weightlifting and fitness programs, and soon after it was not unlikely to find me spending 2+ hours every day in the gyms on campus.  The routine was very exciting to me for over 2 years, but after a while that's exactly what it became, a routine.  I knew exactly what I was going to do in the gym every day, the weight/reps/exercises I would use, and I would already know how tired I was going to be before even setting foot in the gym.  This continued for 4 years total until I graduated from college.

I graduated from UT in 2007 with a degree in Human Biology.  After a summer off, two big things in guiding my life to here happened to me:  I found Crossfit through a friend and I got a general job working in cubicle land ('Cube-a', to me and my friends) for a pharmaceutical research company.  I was able to join an affiliate from Sept 2007 until Jan 2008, until which time my funds were running low and I was unable to attend.  By this time, however, I became a total crossfit junkie.  Eventhough I was unable to go to an affiliate, I spent alot of time each day scouring the Crossfit Journal for new and old posts and being an active member on its online community.  I have a very "night and day" sort of work day as a result:  Get up in the morning, put on the business casual outfit and go spend 8 hours with little to no activity, working with spreadsheets on computers and then changing to workout clothes and spending the evening in the gym.  For the first few months after leaving the affiliate I would workout alone in the gym at my office, but soon enough I recruited a few people who were interested in my training methods.  Before I knew it, I had a group of people that would show up everyday after work to workout with me.  I found myself dishing out the free Journal artical on nutrition and the Zone Diet to each of them.  My 'watercooler' talks at the office turned into nutrition advice sessions as a result of interested coworkers wanting to know how I had changed some of their colleagues' eating habits for the better.  My cubicle, haha, has gone from barren, to having a small whiteboard for the WOD, to now having a whiteboard that takes up an entire wall of the cube, with the entire week's programming on it along with everyone's times:

Notice the broken 5lb dumbbell I use as a paperweight.  It was around this time that I realized what it is that I love to do.  It is what I have been doing voluntarily for friends for the last 3 years.  Working overtime in the cubicle would drive me near insanity, while I could never get enough of staying after to work with others in the gym, give them nutrition advice and more importantly receive advice from these people.  One piece of encouragement sent me on a mission to find out if being a personal trainer was the right thing for me.  As you can imagine, it didn't take long to reach the conclusion that this is what I want.  And so my journey to reach some kind of fulfillment in my life has begun and it feels good.  How lucky am I to have a job helping others improve their quality of life!  Its exciting to think these thoughts have always been a part of my life and I have now found the appropriate outlet!